Early Semester Feedback

You don’t have to wait until the end of the semester to ask your students about their course experiences. Early semester feedback is a way for you to learn about student experiences in your course, and your teaching methods and strategies that influence your student learning, make changes to your course and support student learning. To learn more, read the Weekly Teaching Note: Engage Your Students with Early Semester Feedback.

The feedback is confidential, anonymous, and provides a way to assess and be responsive to students’ needs while the semester is in progress.

What are the benefits?

Early-semester feedback can help you manage your classroom and enhance student learning. The survey can help you understand what is working well and what might be improved. One advantage of this approach over the standard end-of-semester course evaluations is that early-semester feedback occurs early enough in the semester that you can make changes in the course right away and see their effect. Students respond positively when their comments result in changes to the course, leading to improved student attitudes about the class and/or instructor in the end-of-semester evaluations (Keutzer, 1993; Overall and Marsh, 1979).

How does it work?

You can sign up for early-semester feedback here . After signing up, CTL staff will set up the survey and give you a link to provide your students. After your students complete the survey, CTL staff will help you interpret the survey results and decide how to best respond to your students’ needs. Sometimes your response might include making a change to an aspect of the course. Sometimes your response might be a conversation with the students in which you explain the rationale you used in designing the course, and how they might engage better with it.